Needle
His name was Peter Benjamin Parker.
His parents died, and his uncle and aunt took care of him in the best way he could have ever imagined, as if he were their own son. When he was a teenager, wandering around Oscorp, he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Peter ignored it, even though he saw how it changed him drastically...
Peter ignored it, even though his hands were releasing a sticky white substance that resembled spider webs...
Then Uncle Ben and Aunt May died in a car accident.
Everything happened so quickly.
When he was 20 years old, in his first year of college, he performed the funeral and gave an emotional speech, although he didn’t cry. The people who consoled him were colleagues and friends of Uncle Ben and Aunt May. Peter didn’t have any friends to comfort him. He stood alone in front of their graves with a blank, faded look in his eyes. His Uncle Ben’s and Aunt May’s colleagues and friends watched him with concern and sorrow.
They couldn’t comfort him. They couldn’t say anything to the boy who lost the two most important people in his life in one moment.
In his childhood, he lost his parents.
In his adolescence, he had his uncle and aunt.
And he gained strange spider-like powers...
In the beginning of his youth, he lost two family members again.
Life is tough sometimes.
And it destroys you piece by piece.
It’s painful... crushing.
Suffocating.
Peter returned from that funeral with his mind completely empty. He took off his black coat and threw his phone away, discarded his black suit, unbuttoned his collar, and lay on the couch in his silent apartment, staring at the ceiling with faded brown eyes. He hadn’t shed a single tear. He could hear the well-wishers’ voices that stirred his frustration, as if a million voices were trying to speak to him at once.
Am I cruel?
Am I heartless because I didn’t cry?
I guess Uncle Ben’s and Aunt May’s friends and colleagues think I am.
That I’m ungrateful... that I might be denying their kindness and care for me?
Their love for me without any expectation, providing everything I needed, despite their own struggles to feed another mouth.
Could I have saved them... with my strange, superhuman abilities?
Peter blinked, and something fell onto his cheek. He smiled a trembling smile and said, "Huh... I think I want to be a doctor."
He didn’t know why he even thought of that or why he said it out loud, or why it even crossed his mind, but he remembered that Aunt May was a nurse, and he remembered the pain that overwhelmed him at that moment—the loss that tore him apart. Then, he realized his decision.
"I’m going to be a doctor."
Then he whispered to himself,
‘So no one has to go through what I went through.’
He bit his lip, covered his face with his hands, and gasped, crying and crying until his eyes were swollen from the tears.
___________________
Peter Parker, 31 years old, sat in his small clinic in a dark alley in New York, focusing on stitching up a patient's wound. The man groaned loudly, then spat angry words in Peter’s face with a sarcastic laugh, saying in a voice full of arrogance
"Be careful, you filthy doctor, don’t you know who I am?!–"
He raised his hand in an attempt to throw a punch, but Peter, without hesitation, clicked his tongue in annoyance and slapped the man's hand away. He said sharply, reproachfully
"Raise your fist at me again, and I’ll make your stitches more painful."
The man clenched his mouth in anger, grinding his teeth, but he endured the pain in silence.
No one asked Peter about the reason that made him, twelve years ago, change his career path. He could have become a physics teacher or a scientist in Oscorp labs, but he chose medicine. Maybe it was because losing the ones we love truly changes us.
Peter tightened the last stitch, then looked at the muscular man in front of him, who was seriously wounded and bleeding at the end of the alley near his clinic. He didn’t want to leave a bleeding man staining the street with his blood and bringing a bad reputation to the clinic.
It was now the same bleeding man, staring at him cautiously, as though expecting him to hurt him. Peter raised an eyebrow silently, then wrapped a bandage around the wound and said
"Good as new. Listen to me, sir...?"
The man hesitated, his lips tightly pressed, as though thinking of hiding his name, but he finally decided to reveal it. After all, the strange doctor who pulled him here treated him for free...
"My name is Sandman... don’t you know me?"
Peter raised an eyebrow, rubbed his beard for a moment, then shook his head briefly A calm smile appeared on his lips, but it made Sandman feel a slight discomfort.
"Welcome, Mr. Sandman When you recover, pay me. Don’t have money? Simple, I’ll write you a bill, and you can reimburse me later If you don’t find money, just give me something I want hm..Do you have a microwave? If you do, your debt to me for the treatment will be considered paid once you give it to me."
Sandman stared at him in disbelief, as if trying to absorb what he was hearing. His mouth opened and closed as if he was unable to speak.
'Is this man mocking me? No... What does he mean by that? A microwave...? Is he serious? Doesn’t he know who I am?'
Peter watched him for a moment, then tapped his chin before moving to sit at his desk and starting to fill out some papers on his desk in front of the clinic bed.
"Rest now and sleep I’ll bring you food... Hmm, okay, it’s 1 a.m. now, I’ll bring you breakfast in the morning. So relax, Mr. Sandman, and I wish you a speedy recovery."
Then he looked up at him sharply behind his glasses and added in a warning tone, but with a smile that was never comfortable
"And my advice? Don’t threaten me or try to destroy the clinic; it won’t do you any good except draw unwanted attention. So be a nice patient, and I’ll be a nice doctor."
Sandman’s stomach tightened a little, and he quickly replied
"Of course... Doc."
Then Peter calmly turned and returned to his work at his desk, completely unconcerned by Sandman’s tense gaze.
Sandman was still sitting on the clinic bed early in the morning, still not grasping what was happening. In the height of his astonishment, the strange doctor returned after a few hours carrying a tray of food with hot breakfast. He placed it in front of him and said in a calm tone, but with an order that was not up for discussion
"Eat everything."
Sandman looked at the food, then at Peter, as if expecting a trick. But eventually, he began to eat silently, driven by his extreme hunger. He finished his plate completely, and lifted his head to find Peter watching him patiently. Then Peter said without any introduction
"You’re in good condition now. You can leave."
Peter stood up and patted his shoulder lightly before placing some medicine and painkillers in front of him. He said sternly
"Take this when needed, and don’t overexert yourself until the wound fully heals."
Sandman hesitated for a moment, looked at the medicine in his hands, then sighed quietly before saying:
"If I owe you for treating me... then the microwave? I have one, I’ll bring it."
Peter’s eyes widened with childlike excitement, as if he had just received a birthday gift. He jumped up from his place, grabbed a notebook, took a pen out of his white coat, and quickly handed it to Sandman saying:
"Sign here, write your name, just to make sure you’ll bring it to me."
Sandman looked at him in confusion, but he took the paper and wrote on it before replying "Okay..."
He felt strange that this doctor hadn’t reported him to the authorities yet... Does he really not know who I am? Or is he pretending to be ignorant?
In any case, Sandman wasn’t joking. Thanks to his powers, he returned after just a few minutes, carrying the microwave. He used his sand powers to move quickly and landed in front of the clinic door.
Before he could even knock, the door opened quickly, and he found Peter standing there. He jumped up and started looking at the microwave as if it were a sacred treasure. He carefully held it, examined it thoroughly, and smiled with satisfaction.
"Awesome... this is great!"
Sandman silently watched the scene, not believing that a doctor saved his life in exchange for just a microwave... But suddenly, he realized something: he hadn’t asked for the name of this strange doctor.
He lifted his gaze to Peter, who was absorbed in examining his new device, and said
"Doctor... what’s your name? You never told me. And there’s not even an ID badge on your white coat."
Peter raised his head from the microwave, looked at him for a moment, then said calmly
"Peter Parker. Nice to meet you."
Sandman stared at him for another moment, then nodded and said
"Well... nice to meet you, Doctor Parker. Enjoy the microwave, I guess?"
Peter waved at him with a smile, watching as Sandman dissolved into his sand and disappeared into the alley. Then he turned back to the microwave, his eyes shining with happiness.
"Oh my god... this is amazing! Way better than my old one!"
Without hesitation, he carried the microwave inside, as if he had just obtained the greatest prize of his life.